Back to School with Greg & Keri: Real Talk + Real Digital Marketing Tips

It’s officially back-to-school season—and not just for the kids! In this episode of the Code of Entry Podcast, Greg and Keri chat about the highs and lows of the first day back, the tech their kids are using (TI-84s still exist?!), and how schools are navigating digital evolution. But that’s not all…

We dive deep into:

• 💻 When to revamp your website—and what red flags to watch for
• 📱 Do you really need an app for your business? (Spoiler: probably not)
• 🤖 How to scale your business with AI tools like GPT and Claude
• 📅 What to prioritize for digital marketing before the end of the year

Plus, a heartfelt shoutout to Vince Bondage, former Director of the Data Warfare Division and a standout mentor who helped shape our journey.

Whether you're a parent juggling school schedules or a business owner prepping for Q4, this episode brings laughs, lessons, and actionable advice.

🎧 Listen now and stay sharp on the digital edge.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Code of Entry Podcast where we cloud the issues with facts and help you upskill to stay on the digital edge. Here's your host, Greg, with the latest.

Hey, team Greg back here with another code of Entry podcast, accompanied by my co-host, Keri KFF, Keri Fisher, princess one each one, each. Awesome. Got another episode for you Today we're gonna talk a little bit about going back to school 'cause I know it's pretty early for most people in the country.

But somehow some way our kids went back today, it's August 4th by the way, and they went back for their first day of school today. So we'll talk a little bit about back to school stuff. Hopefully some of you have some time to prep still. And then we've got a shout out to give and we'll start talking about some fall digital marketing things.

Okay. Anything you wanna say to start? I have a freshman in high school. Did you think that would be a thing? No. I know, and I think I was more nervous than she was. I know she said she was nervous, but she was still talkative and [00:01:00] happy and was ready to go in the morning and got her backpack together on Saturday way before even needing to have it together.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So I don't have a freshman in high school. Yeah, sophomore in college and junior in high school. But it is interesting now, right? 'cause I think the kids are a lot more grown than we were. And it's, and it's hit and miss, right? I don't know if they're necessarily as culturally mature, like in their surroundings, like interacting with people in person.

Emotional intelligence wise? But they're definitely exposed to a lot more. So it's, whereas, when we were in school, you would've been gone, I haven't seen these people in three months. Oh my God, what's everybody gonna be like? And now it's oh yeah, I was just snapping with them last night.

Or, yeah, I've never met them before, but we all, we've all been talking already. It's what? Yeah, we've been talking all summer. I just haven't met them in person. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. So I don't know about the back to school jitters other than the. Yeah, I still don't know, how your teachers are gonna be or if you [00:02:00] can find your classroom and that kind of thing.

But I think it's just a different level of I don't know, angst now. I got nervous mostly 'cause I don't know what it's gonna be like for her. And I have a little mama bear instincts of I don't want anything bad to happen to her. I don't want her first day to go horrible. I want her to have a good experience, not like

be terrified or anything like that. And day one, so far, not terrified. Just doesn't like it. One particular class, not terrified, just wants to drop one class. Be like, wait a minute, how do you know what drops are already? Yeah. Day one in high school. And you're like, I want to drop a class. How did you, how do you know how that works?

I don't think I ever realized I could drop a class. Yes. And in fairness, I would probably also be asking that question of, can I drop this class? 'cause I don't think a freshman should be taking the class. Yeah, but to the other point, did you know it was a thing? Yeah, I knew like when entered high mean, I definitely quit one of my classes freshman year.

I definitely did that. I guess I could have anticipated that, but what, [00:03:00] just kidding. Just kidding. Yeah. That's crazy. School started. So yours, first, first day of freshman year. Mine first day of junior year. And one of the other things with technology is dual enrollment is in full effect.

And even more post COVID because they've got the digital learning stuff, down. So my my son gets home at 11. Wait, what? Every day? 11. That's like a half day. Yeah. And his classes don't start for another few weeks. So he got home at 11 today what's up dad? And I'm like I'm trying to do work.

Leave me alone. But how was your day? Nevermind. I can't listen right now. I'm on a meeting, but talk to you later. But yeah, 11 every day it's oh my gosh, like the world has changed. Do you even get lunch? I am very food motivated, but that was one of the big things that we were like super excited.

Nobody has to pack his lunch. We don't have to prep his lunch. He can come home and eat. So sweet. Yeah, the Fisher House stopped doing that a long time ago. If they want lunch, they can make it themselves. They are too able bodied teenagers, freshman year, seventh grader. [00:04:00] Yeah, we could do that, but our kids would've been like rolling up with Twinkies every day.

So we're good. That's true. Mine. Definitely I do have one that likes to snack and she'll bring snacks for her friends and she forgot her snacks today for her friends and she was a little bit devastated getting outta the car this morning. So hopefully tomorrow she'll remember these little orangey mango snack things.

I don't know. Yeah, so we, I mean we started with high school your daughter going to high school already wants to drop a class. Yes. Awesome but she is taking introduction, hardware, so computers. I think I got a nerd winning. Yeah. And , that's good. Lucas' significant thing today was more of a significant thing last week because he had his parking pass.

He's in the gravel parking lot. He's no, I hate the gravel parking lot. Man, you're at school for five seconds, you'll be okay. He's yeah, that's right. You, what did they have last year? He got one last year. He did, like he was on a waiting list. He ended up getting one in the gravel lot. Oh, it was still gravel.

Okay. Yeah, so he was just looking for a real parking spot this year. But it'll gotta wait till [00:05:00] next year. It'll be okay. Poor kid, you can drive to school. Sorry that you don't have your best parking spot ever. That's funny. Yeah, it'll be okay. I guess he knows a lot of kids in his classes, so that's good.

Okay, good. And they actually started doing stuff for school Friday because there was a football game preseason and, they have the cyber support team at Greenbrier and I don't really know. It's really cyber support team. I think they, sorry if you're listening to this, I think they make it sound cooler than it is just so they get kids to volunteer.

It is a neat opportunity, but they like run the equipment on the sidelines and do all the video taping and stuff so that, they have film and whatever. So it's cool. I don't know if there's a lot of cyber to it or there's a lot of it to it. But yeah, cyber support team, so the cyber support team stuff started.

No. Nice on Friday, so they're already getting in the hang of it. How was middle school uneventful? She did have homework already and it was how to she had to depict a scientist. That was her homework to draw a scientist. I said, Hey, did you draw? I'd be interested to see what she draws [00:06:00] from.

Yeah. I said, Hey, did you draw a data scientist? And she goes, oh, that's not a real scientist. I drew a real scientist, which with the little beaker and the little thermometer thingy, and yeah, that's what she drew and actually used her highlighters to color it in. I was like, Hey, what about me? She's no, that's not real.

That's what I was gonna ask. I was Did she draw you? No, evidently not. She did not. It's I might not be a real scientist, but the pay is okay. Yeah, it does pay well. Yeah. Uneventful, which was good. She did make a friend, she does not know her name, but she did make a friend and she did give me a quote that I was supposed to say, and I said, do you want me to say that quote where everybody else can hear?

And maybe judge you on what you've said. She said nevermind. I'm just gonna keep that as an inside thought, oh, good. Good awareness. Yeah. So I still haven't learned that and I'm much older. Yes. Yeah. So we used to have this thing at work that like I could be reading Keri's face and she wouldn't be saying something.

So I would say something and she'd be like, that's exactly what I was thinking. I'd be like, yeah. I say the things [00:07:00] you think about saying, sorry, they were always mean. Or just very truth hurts. Yeah. Very truthful things that might, I wasn't being mean, I was being truthful. That's the, I always have that argument with people.

There's a line between personal and professional, personally. Sure. Let's go have a beer professionally. I'll let you know. That's not personal, but yeah, that's true. Yes. Cheers. Cheers. So that's our back to school. The only thing I was gonna say maybe technologically was how about those calculators?

Did you find the TI 3000 or whatever the calculator number is now? That's what I told that's what I told the older one TI 84. They did have them for $50 off at Target. And so yeah, it's actually being delivered to the house probably. Nice. Yeah, I remember the first time I got one of those calculators, it was like a, I think they called it a TI 89 probably TI 1989 now.

But maybe, but you could like type on it and somebody had figured out like how to play, [00:08:00] like the game where you like, bounce the ball back and forth, break the blocks or whatever on it. This is great and we can type on it. Yeah. They're way beyond that now. It's crazy.

Yeah, I don't know why she got, she had to get in 84. I remember getting like a TI 80 and an 83 back in the day, but still, and whatever the textbook maker made the class with. So the teachers don't have to figure out a calculator. Graphing, calculator. Complete purchase, complete. Awesome. Yeah, and it's, and it used to be that was probably like the most powerful thing in our backpack.

'cause we didn't have cell phones and computers and whatever. It's just like, why don't you let 'em use their cell phone? Why don't we have an approved app for that? You definitely don't need the calculator anymore. Just saying a harsh reality of both of my kids not being able to use their phone all day.

they used to be able to use our cell phones until this year. Yeah. Like they were very permissive. Which I thought was weird. Be sitting anywhere, and then all of a sudden I get a text from one of my kids. It's like a football highlight.

I'm like, what? What? First I'm proud that you're sending me [00:09:00] football stuff. That's cool. But hey, it's cool. You're supposed to be listening and I totally would've been doing if I was you, but I'm not gonna tell you that. Mine would just be like, Hey, I don't feel good. You wanna come home from school, be like I guess I am close by enough, I can come pick you up.

Do you need to go to the nurse's office first before I come pick you up? I don't wanna go to the nurse's office. Too bad. Yeah. Yeah. Now they don't have that easy out 'cause they can't use their phones. But the calculator industry is interesting, right? You could do it all on your laptop.

You could do it all on your cell phone. I guess they probably don't all have laptops yet in middle school, sometime in high school. I know they have to have 'em at college. But at what point do we say, Hey, you're taking statistics or you're taking geometry. You're going to use these laptops and we're gonna have you use R.

Yeah. Post COVID, most households are expected to have some sort of e-learning capability with a laptop, whether it belongs to the kid or not. Like they do test it like once a quarter for it. So why not teach them [00:10:00] are and make them nerds. Yeah, I mean it's, use R Studio and have r which is a statistical programming language one letter R or even, Python.

I think python's probably a little bit higher barrier to learning if you're just doing math. But if you're doing, if you're coding and trying to do more, it's probably the lowest barrier of entry. But yeah, I agree. Yeah, that would be interesting. We settle up for college too. Hey, you're doing an AP class.

Like the class your daughter wants to drop? Yes. AP gov. Yeah. Freshman year. Guess what? Not sure about that. Yeah, 'cause we used R , when I was teaching at West Point, and I think the computer science department primarily used Python, but the systems department, we used all our for data science stuff.

Sweet. So moving on. We're using it as a soundproof thing to put our drinks on right now. Pull out the mouse pad, the data warfare division. So in the government data has gotten like important, I'll say the first people to do it good, and I'll stand on [00:11:00] that all day was Army Cyber.

And we like there, there's a bunch of news and stuff about people in the army at least hanging up, like data warfare companies or whatever, the data warfare division at our cyber first data warfare division. First director of the Data of Warfare Division, Vince Bondage, and oh, we wanna do a shout out.

So cheers to Vince. Cheers. Cheers to Vince, Director of Programs and Customer Experience Lead at Enlighten, a Huntington Ingalls Industries Company. Congratulations. It's been five years since he retired. Yeah. Dilly. Yeah. Dilly. That's awesome. So now I'm director at a company that does great things.

I, I don't know if there's. I don't know if there are a lot of places you could go to make the data impact on the government at least especially in cyberspace that there would be there. And a lot of it due to Vince. Being able to take that kind of real world customer that customer lens with his technical savvy and put it all together for somebody.

So we're proud of you, Vince. Love you. And, [00:12:00] keep doing great things. Yes, please. Keep paving the way. So I asked, I wanted you to share like your favorite mentor story from him. Oh man. What do you think about? So the, I've got a couple. So one was, I remember when Keri got promoted to CW four and Vince, he had been in charge of the team for a while by then.

And he, we go to the promotion and he, this is, this, super personable guy from Jersey, you can tell he is from Jersey. If he's in civilian clothes within 10 seconds and starts doing the promotion and talking about Keri and he's got these like index cards and he's like stumbling over himself and it's what's this joker doing? I can't believe it like this. There's no way, this is Vince. What, what's going on? And then after 20 seconds, he's sorry Kerry, I can't read your writing of all this good stuff you wanted me to say about you. And he threw it away and started talking.

It's okay. He set me up. That was great. I think the thing with Vince was always like, I would get super spun up on stuff very fast and he never would. And [00:13:00] always the point of I always felt he was very thorough and meticulous when I I still do, I to fly by the seat of my pants, like I've got it or I don't.

And I can probably learn it quickly and I can talk about it and I can orchestrate 30 things at once. I'm very good at juggling. But Vince is very good at he can still juggle, but he's very good at taking a handful of things and addressing it from end to end and document it and make sure that it's repeatable and people can understand it.

And it's just, it's an awesome skill that I still haven't perfected. I think I'm still a little fast and loose, so I rely on a lot of other people, and I think he's one of those unique individuals that doesn't always need a lot of other people. Because he can take something and do it from end to end.

I'm definitely a team lead kind of person, and he can just be the whole team, honestly. And he's a good team leader too. But he can juggle the team and pick up a task and do it from end to end. And I'm better, I'm a better orchestrator. So I think that's the thing I took away as just he's we're both systems engineers by kind of [00:14:00] degree.

But there's different types and while yeah, I'm good on the problem definition, the problem solving he's very good at also documenting everything in between and understanding all this dependencies. So I had the privilege of working for him twice. So it was pretty exciting for the second time.

First time I didn't know what I was getting into, but I did enjoy. He always took on the hard problems. Like it was never something that he would pass the book on, if it was one of the harder ones and he had to go engage, over a 12 hour period and it was, d or dawn to dusk. Like he did all of those things and let us be able to do the work that he wanted us to do.

So I always felt was he a good shield for the team? Yes. And he represented everything. Ideally, like I couldn't probably ask for a better leader that way. And then the second time I worked for him. It is the same. It's just now he is, we're working in a different, like world interacting with more engineers, more technical savvy folks, [00:15:00] talking with more customers, and he's still, it's the same

Vince, his rapport is the same. He can, talk your ear off, have a great time, get to know you, understand your problem, decompose the problem, solve the problem, and then call it a day and be like, this is done. It's great. Couldn't have asked to, I'd probably, I'd go work for him again. Yeah.

Yeah. Alright. Yeah, so another one, and this wasn't supposed to be the Vince Pon Sponsors podcast, but hey, it is today. It is today. Interesting. Another time with Vince. He had just joined the team. I'd been on the team for a while. The other guys that have been on the team like disappeared in the middle of the night to a special project, which happened to people on our team sometimes.

And, we got a phone call and it was Christmas and we had to go support something, like work a couple days straight, whatever. And we get back from that. And I check in with Vince and he's like, why didn't you call me? I was like you're new. Like I I've got it covered.

There's no reason to ruin both of ours. She's no. That's not how this works. I'm in, I wanna be in and you work for me and [00:16:00] I'm supposed to insulate you from these things. And I was like, yeah, but you couldn't have this time. But it was one of those like. There aren't a lot of people that way.

Yes, be like, oh yeah, you got this. Cool. Take it. I don't wanna, I don't want to, waste my leave or so it was a good start to the relationship. So even though I go back in time, I still wouldn't call him. I don't wanna ruin his holiday with his family. But yeah, if you had to redo it, yeah, if I had to redo it, do the same thing, I would do the same thing.

But hopefully for all the right reasons, right? Because, what we were doing, what we were supporting at the time, yes, it was important, but two of us wouldn't have made a difference. But I appreciate the willingness to make the sacrifice. I appreciate his leadership style to be able to deal with me and with Greg.

At the same time, there's dealing with me at the same time. What, yes, personalities will flow.

Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely special talents to deal with that one for sure. I don't know about me, but that one, yes. [00:17:00] All right, so we're gonna move on, but congratulations Vince. Digital marketing frequently asked questions. So we're at the five year anniversary of Code of Entry and it's honestly I think an uncomfortable point.

One uncomfortable side, just being like, Hey, you're a technology company and you have to stay relevant. I think we're doing okay on that front. But the other one is approaching clients to be like, Hey, your website is three to five years old. It might be time to revamp it. So the question of when to revamp your website comes up.

It's Hey, you guys just did this just five years ago and things change and requirements change and technology changes and the internet changes and it's hard to be like, Hey, over the last five years we've probably done 300 changes to your site, adding features and adding things that you wanted and hobbling things together.

And it's probably time to [00:18:00] refactor it from end because we've added a lot of tech that we need to work it off. We just need to refresh it. Oh, design styles change. People in your company change. So there's just a lot of stuff. So the first question, so I'll kick it to Keri to see what you thinks, but when do you need to revamp your website?

Usually I advise folks that you need to have some sort of traction on your website, so you don't wanna invest any of your hard-earned money in something that hasn't been performing for you already. So if you're, if you have a shop and you're trying to sell some stuff, you probably do wanna make sure it is pristine enough for folks to

wanna go to it, right? If you have a website that's more just static and it's just there to make sure you have a presence online and you can link it to your Google business profile, it's not really a big deal. Okay? Maybe you could take the risk and let it go for another couple years and not make any updates and leave it the design as it is.

But if you use your website to get leads for your business or use it to host some sort of shop and you gain revenue from that business. I go all in. 'cause [00:19:00] that's your digital presence like that. It's not just the storefront. That is your only storefront possibly. So you need to make it the best representative of yourself you can and yeah.

Like the three to five year mark. Yeah. If it takes a year to get the website up and running. You probably wanna start planning it now and then figure out when you might wanna launch it a little bit later, but there's been a whole bunch of websites that have been refactoring either. The website itself or their icons the SiriusXM just did some updates and some of their icons are vastly different than what they used to be.

So there's just like incremental changes where you might notice it, but you probably, if you don't want your customers to be caught off guard of a full revamp and the buttons are in a completely different place than they used to be. Maybe it's a little more gradual, but if you're, you need to make the investment, if that's how you wanna gain more revenue that it's a no brainer, right? Yeah. And I guess that's interesting 'cause I went left, you went right there. I went to the, Hey, you're working with somebody and you already have a modern website. When should you revamp it? [00:20:00] Versus the, Hey, you've got an existing website. However, when she should, you get a new one.

And I, I think another important consideration on that side that you went is also. If you don't have traction on your website, which you would like to just get somebody's opinion, somebody should give it to you for free. And because I know that I'm a computer dork, I hate it when I'm trying to find information on something and I go to somebody's website and it looks like I could have made it in third grade.

And it's just okay this isn't professional. It has none information I want, it doesn't tell me about the company, it doesn't tell me about the services. There's nothing about the people. The pricing might be a phone number, might be an email. Oh, by the way, it's a Facebook page or Gmail, I'm out.

So it's just a, okay. There's the other consideration of do you have a website and it doesn't get traction and you don't care, or it should get traction or you wanna look reputable, right? So that there's phases to this. One is if you're gonna have a website, at least look reputable. And then if you're gonna have a website and you [00:21:00] expect to get traction.

Then you need to do search engine optimization. You need to have content on it. You need to be informative so that people can see something. Particularly now with all these AI search results, you've gotta have content on your website because that content will get served up by the AI and linked to your website.

So when somebody asks a question there's generally now links to where they got the answer from. Hopefully they get pointed back to you or they're never gonna find you because it's the sales funnel is completely getting destroyed, right? Like the top is getting cut off the sales funnel the informational stuff from before at the top of the sales funnel.

It's now gonna be answered by AI. And until somebody's ready to buy, they're not gonna start looking and it's gonna be harder to target them. So the top of the sales funnel is becoming you categorizing things that'll get the search results into the AI to then funnel them to you, or at least raise awareness on your name.

So that hopefully you get a direct link later in the funnel. And I know I've gone off of [00:22:00] revamping your website there, but that's a revamp. That isn't a technical, how does it look? How does it perform today on the site? Are are you getting leads directly on your site? Does it function?

All that kind of stuff that, hey, we can help with, but it's also that is it gonna perform into the future as kind of these AI search results take over and it's gonna be harder to do search engine optimization. Yeah pay-per-click, paid ads is gonna start to perform a little bit better I think than it has in the past, unless you have content on your site.

Yeah. I think if you're not thinking about your target demographic and how that could be changing, that's probably also a problem. So if your normal sales funnel was, show them a little information and hopefully they'll call you. You're getting into more of a demographic that doesn't wanna call anybody.

They just wanna get the answers to what they want and then they want to purchase whatever it is. I had a couple spots I was looking at in Myrtle Beach for dinner or just different spots. And there was like three or four places that were like, one of 'em was like, I know it was kid friendly 'cause it had like dinosaur stuff on it and website was janky.

Like [00:23:00] I couldn't find anything really about it. I couldn't make reservations and I had a big party that I was trying to do. Most of the stuff I know you might have to go in person or you can call for reservations, but if you can't do some sort of thing online with that website, you might wanna rethink it a little bit because at least if you're targeting me and my demographic, you're missing out on me.

Yeah, and that's one of the interesting things with tourist destinations and I don't think they've evolved very well. The tourist destinations are foot traffic heavy. And the more and more used to we're getting with DoorDash and Uber Eats. Yeah. And being able to look up stuff online and make a decision about where we wanna go and be informed, versus driving down the street and looking at signs and being like, oh, that place has alligators.

That looks cool. Sorry. Fudpuckers, Destin yeah, you've gotta have an online presence because somebody's gonna be like, Hey, what does everybody wanna eat tonight? Oh, we want seafood well let's look it up and see what's close. And then you're gonna start looking and it's not gonna be let's drive down the beach

we'll see something soon. Yeah. I mean that, foot traffic thing's gonna exist. But it's gonna [00:24:00] diminish more and more because we have digital natives getting older and they're used to just being able whip out the cell phone and be like, let's look at all the restaurants within 10 minutes of here and then let's click on 'em and see what their websites look like.

Yep. That's the rest I have for websites. If you're thinking about, it might be time you can always reach out to Code of Entry. We'll talk to you for free about your website. Performance is king. The only thing I'll say left about performance though is you can also over optimize.

And we have some clients that have people that they like to do this and be like, oh, I went to X tool to get a rating on my website, and it said that we were an 87 out of a hundred. Okay, you're an 87 out of a hundred because your website is big and it does advance things and it looks super cool, and you're being rated at a hundred out of a hundred of a plain HTML page.

Popping up as a splash page or amazon.com, which has unlimited server resources behind their homepage so you can over optimize. It's really would your type of user get to the page and be happy with the [00:25:00] speed? And generally the answer is gonna be yes. So you can definitely over optimize. I wouldn't use that as your main revamping thing, but just the put yourself in your customer's shoes, not your shoes.

Could. Honestly this is gonna be in trouble, but I could care less about how you think the flow should work on your website. You need to get in your customer's shoes. What should they think? What should they want to see? They're never gonna be the experts you are. They're not gonna know the right questions to ask, right?

So we gotta meet in the middle, but put yourself in your customer's shoes. How fast does it load? Okay? Is that fast enough? Is it mobile or desktop? These people are in the office buildings, so they'll be desktop. These people are on construction sites. It's probably mobile. Okay, let's target that and then make sure they have an experience that they would intend to get to, to buy something from you.

So that's websites, time to revamp, probably always say two, every two years, I would probably start engaging or at least reviewing on your own, because that three year mark is generally about right. Last part I actually [00:26:00] forgot about is just the evolution of just Chat GPT or bots in general, and having a bot answer some of the FAQs or be interactive and then tipping and queuing into a real person is also some

newer options. We had some static content you could actually have a bot like kind of interact with, but it's a little bit more robust now. So if you don't have something that's also helping to answer the questions or learning a little bit more about what the user experience is you get some feedback that way you can figure out how to target your demographic better too.

Yeah, our clients' AI bots have been, i'd say surprisingly effective. Yeah. They've been good. They've been routing good questions. They've been getting lead phone calls. And if they ask, somebody asks something that they don't have an answer to, they'll be like, oh, we don't know

here's an email, but we'll get the notification that like, Hey, here's a topic. Yeah. So pretty cool. It'll needs to be trained. So still a shout out to training what the answers are. But yes, so far, two thumbs up. I [00:27:00] recommend. Yeah. Nice. The next digital marketing, FAQ, and this comes up quite a bit.

I'll ask Keri what she thinks first, 'cause I have a one-sided answer. I think I've mentioned several times on the podcast, but when should you make an app as a business? When you ever, you can monetize it, is what I think the overall and state. I feel like that's probably with a lot of answers.

You could probably just say that, but. Unless you're have something that you're selling a tool, a piece of information, selling your podcast, selling whatever it is, you're selling a thing and you can make your store into that app. Okay? General sharing of information. You have other avenues and outlets

you can do that at a cheaper cost. So you can do a podcast, you can put stuff on a website, you can make different FAQs or whatever it might be. But making the investment into an app that costs significant amount of time, significant amount of development, significant amount of maintenance. Just think about every time you open [00:28:00] up your phone and you have an app that needs to be updated. If Apple pushes out a update, chances are your app's gonna update within 48 to 72 hours.

So you're gonna be updating that thing, what, at least once, twice a month. Android's similar, right? If you don't wanna pay for that many updates, 'cause that's what's gonna need to happen. I would highly recommend not doing the app and just keeping that desktop presence and then mobile optimizing your website itself.

Yeah I'm in the almost never bucket. Almost never, because the chances are that if you're gonna ask, I'm gonna be like I don't recommend it. There are some use cases, right? But generally, hey, did you know that when you're on a website on your phone, if you hit the bookmark button, you can add it to your screen as an app tile?

So if you have a fave icon set up as your bookmark, you can add it just like it's an app on the screen so you can do all the stuff. You can look like you're an app, but it can be hosted on your website. You don't have to do any of the [00:29:00] app reviews or app accounts or update with the app things or the app security terms or the Apple Pay integrations and all that stuff that's required.

And I guess I'm staying mostly with the Apple side 'cause and it's funny, Android's, Wild Wild West I got my start doing Android applications and, they were much easier to review very easily to get a phone to do whatever you want. Caution. I don't have an Android phone for that reason.

But on the app side, I think, Keri was talking about monetization and one of the other interesting things about an app is where use cases where location data is very important, might be a reason for an app. Times where you need a lot of two-way communication with customers or a lot of interaction back and forth with customers, an app might be the right way.

'Cause the integrated system messaging that gets used for like push notifications doesn't cost you like text messages do. So if you have a whole lot of folks doing that if we're talking. [00:30:00] Regional hospital practices that want to send messages. Okay. You can send text messages or maybe you need an app that can do that, push messaging, but to put it the scale of that, I say that the, those system push messages are free.

You have to have a server and set up the service and whatever, but. The message itself is free and you have to pay for text messages. The text messages at volume, if you're paying for them, are very low. And when we're talking about apps, you're probably talking $50,000 investment to start your app, and probably $30,000 a year to have somebody maintain it and keep it upgraded with all the latest security patches and iOS releases and features.

So for that first year. Let's just say that, let's average it out at $30,000 a year. So for $30,000 a year you can send, a million text messages. So just, if that's your only use case. So it just comes to the monetization. Do you care about location information? Do you need [00:31:00] some. Do you need some interactions with messages?

Lastly, and she said monetization, but like the in-app purchases, the in-app purchases are nice if you have digital content or real product that you wanna sell. Yeah, cool. In-app purchases. But yeah for most brick and mortar businesses, it doesn't make sense. Your easiest entry is to find, i'm gonna say affiliate, but that's not necessarily the right word, like reseller or affiliate apps

that do something that you want to do and sign on for that and get your own branded copy of their app, right? So what'll happen is somebody will download generic app X and they'll put in your code and that'll be customized for them, right? Or your local gym. Your local gym probably doesn't have their own app, but they'll have an app that's made for them by the parent company because you wanna know what all the classes are and you wanna be able to scan your QR code and they wanna provide these experience things, communicating back and forth, giving you information in an isolated environment.

But they get to take that cost and spread it out across a franchise. Individual brick and mortars, [00:32:00] sorry. And I, like I said I started a company that was selling an app and I, had to maintain one app and it was a lot of work. Made an app for a client because.

Honestly, I was in the yes phase of, oh, that's fun. I know I can do it. Yeah, let's do it. And in that yes phase, it's the it's gonna be hard to maintain. There's probably other apps that can do it. If I do figure this out it's gonna be hard to maintain and update and somebody else will just come and do it better because they're gonna invest a lot of money because they're gonna spend, and you look at, it was a golf app, right?

And you look at the golf apps now and. Yeah. $70 a year $70 a year between the thousands of people that buy that app. Yeah, sure. They can they can keep it up and modernize it where we were, Hey, a couple hundred downloads, stroke tracker, great idea. No way to get revenue to support the labor involved in keeping it up.

Yeah. So when she, when should you make an app? Almost never. If you're a brick and mortar business, if you're an entrepreneur and you want to make an app for a reason and [00:33:00] like the app is gonna be, your business might be appropriate, I would still say consider making your prototype as a mobile webpage so that you can troubleshoot, increase awareness test the concept, get investors, all that stuff on a mobile website before you go all in on an app.

Good tips. From experience? Phew. From experience. Yep. I'd say making apps is actually pretty fun. I don't think it's all that hard in the grand scheme of coding things, but the yeah, there's a lot of rabbit holes you can go down, right? Because there's just so many packages that are Apple packages or

third party packages that you're gonna pull in that make doing what you do easy, but you don't understand all the dependencies or all the underlying code, or all the gotchas or the updates they're gonna have to make when version, iOS, 99.993 comes out, right? Like I, oh great. That just broke my whole app and I have no idea why.

So it's just, yeah, love hate relationship here. [00:34:00] Next, FAQ. The last one we have for the podcast, are you ready? Yeah. Alright. So what should you be planning between now and the end of the year if you're a business owner and that, and you're trying to break through in that digital marketing area?

Yeah we're in August and if you listen to this now, any day GPT five is gonna come out just the rapid evolution of large language models is dumbfounding. So I think, when GPT five comes out, making sure that you're up to date with that, Claude four has already come out and is very impressive.

So if you're trying to code things manually you just need to stop and try to do your stuff in an LLM, whether it's Claude Code, which is phenomenal, or this GPT five that's gonna come out. Like right now, if you were to make a cost calculator. For a client that, that's great. You need to know all the logic and stuff.

Put it in a file, [00:35:00] tell the LLM to look at the file. Tell it to make the form. Tell it exactly how you want it styled. Hit enter. It'll pop you out. Some HTML, some css, some JavaScript. Put that in your web builder of choice. Again, this is for digital marketers, but put in your web builder of choice. Hit save.

And then start debugging from there 'cause there'll be some little things. There'll be like, oh, elementary CSS overrides this C-S-C-S-S. So you need to put like a important tag in , but that's a lot faster than just doing it from scratch. Being like, oh, how do forms work again? After the post, how do I get this variable back in here, but have it on the same screen.

Oh, not post. I want JavaScript. You can use the LMS to do that. Making content as a digital market is much easier. Now, say the more specific and the prompt that you can get, the better. But yeah prompt engineering is the appropriate term. So investigating GPT five, prompt engineering,

and then maybe just an overview of the art of the possible with AI right now. And most of the AI things are [00:36:00] LLM based, but you don't need to know that, right? Hey, you've got video generators, image generators, article generators being able to take that and figure out how to use it for your business, how to put AI chatbots on your website.

Just, my narrative on AI from 2020. Say 2017 to 2022 was, Hey, this is fake 2023. Maybe soon, 2024. It's oh my God, it's here and now there's not a lot you can't do. So I would throw it into what you should be planning between now and the end of the year being, okay, how do I take my business and look at that?

The next thing, and Keri will laugh at me. But the next thing is, as you look, we're getting to where, you're almost to the next quarter. You've got these, you've got another 30 days or so to think about what you want your next year plans to be. So take the time now that you don't have stress, hopefully you have a year roadmap for this year.

I have growth objectives. I know I don't want people to cross train in, I know. [00:37:00] I wanna specialize in, use the now in your internal head space to figure out, okay, what's the next thing like, okay. AI is cool. GPT five's coming out. How can I leverage that? How do I need to train my people to leverage that?

What are my employees gonna look like? Do I need more people? Do I need less people? What's my business target? Hey, this digital marketing thing, how's it gonna affect my SEO business? Do I need to pitch more pay per click? Do I need to pick? Pitch more local SEO. Do I need to target getting into the LLM results?

It's just all stuff that you have a little bit of head space to think about right now, so that in another month or two you can try to solidify those into your plans. I think what we're gonna find is that businesses like ours will be able to scale much faster than we could in the past because we don't have to find new employees.

We need to take our employees, set them down at a keyboard. And have them write documents on what they do and why they do it and what they're thinking about when they do it [00:38:00] so that we can use that to train an LLM to think like them. They're still gonna have to fact check 'em. But taking from our team, taking a Liana or Christa or an Amy or an Heather or a Michael, and being able to have them sit at the keyboard and be like, Hey, we've got a new client that does this, and this. I need an SEO plan based off what I've done in the past to get started enter, and it can give them a 90% solution, right?

So make that upfront investment in training them and documenting that and doing that work so you can scale your people. You're never gonna scale people. We can finally scale some people, I think, in this space. So get up to date on the current technology and figure out how you can use it to scale the more manual things that you do so you can have your people spend their time with their thought and not their repeatable processes they do. I think that's, I think that's the biggest target I would be at right now. I went from a different perspective of what does it look like between now and the end of the year, especially when it [00:39:00] comes down to different campaigns that you might wanna focus on. And then if you are interested in making the investments, before the end of the year, if you have the available capital you wanna spend it on to get after what you just talked about, yeah, because, so can you do it organically or do you need, you're the business person, right? Yeah. So the tax implications of making the investment now versus January, right? So organically, can you upskill yourself or do you need to outsource that upskill for what you have for your coworkers to meet some of those objectives, right?

So you could do it yourself. There's a lot of folks that, that they do, right? But then there's some that, they wanna train their entire force that way, or they wanna figure out a good, protected way to do their LLMs without it being, complete public knowledge, different things like that, right?

That might take a different type of investment. Yeah and I think one thing I don't want to oversimplify is as a business too, figuring out like. You still have to have the human face to talk to your clients. Yes, [00:40:00] because a lot of our clients can't jump on the computer and start jamming and figure out, oh, let me ask the LLM how to make me my new Wix website, or whatever.

Some will. And good for them. But being able to take a customer and listen to them and figure out what they really mean because you don't know what you don't know. So somebody that's well-meaning. And probably very intelligent, we'll use words that aren't quite, very precise or the right words to explain what they want.

And we have that intuition, we can be like, I think you mean this. And as you show 'em proof of concepts and work through it with them, you can refine that ask and, without that relationship or that ability to be that technical integrator, it's hard to get to the LLM. So I still think there's a lot of value in the people,

but that's where I'm saying you can scale those very talented able people. And in an organization like ours where we've been a boutique, digital marketing firm, Hey, we're not gonna work with you unless we wanna work with you. If we're not a good fit, we're not a good fit, we'll tell you.

And, no harm, no foul, but we'll make sure we're a good fit. And I think what'll happen is we'll be able to just [00:41:00] find some more folks to, to hopefully fit with. Because we can still use our folks, we can still have meetings and whatever, but we don't spend a lot of extra time doing repetitive tasks because we've figured out ways to automate those.

Boom. I am just excited that I was able to take emails and use some sort of automation to make my Slack alerts and to make my ClickUp tasks. And I don't even have to press a button. That's half my work right there. Yeah, so I went straight down the business side of like, how can, you can use it with your people, but also in like internally in the business like.

Hey, there's plugins that'll read your emails and summarize them. They'll take the notes from this podcast or your Zoom calls or your teams meetings, and they'll take the notes and summarize them and email them out to folks that couldn't attend the meeting, right? I do wanna share a joke about that one though.

So I did see online there's somebody that will sign in to whatever that meeting is a few minutes early, so it's [00:42:00] like the five minute early club. And then they just have a discussion about random stuff like pandas in the wild, eating bamboo, or sharks having shark attacks. And then the AI assistant gives them the readout of the full meeting when it's all over.

And the first top two topics are like the pandas and the sharks. And then it goes into, and Bob said we should do a 10% increase in our revenue sales over the next, 90 days. And that's the end of it. That's just the top three. 'cause they kicked it off. So for jokes, if anybody has jokes, challenge accepted, I had not heard that.

Yes. That is beautiful. And if I work with you on any of my jobs and hustles and you listen to this podcast. Don't ruin it. This is gonna be great. Join in. Yeah. Be like key takeaways. Greg is a Sagittarius. He enjoys long walks on the beach. We expect that we'll have, that probably happens anyway.

'cause I always I've told that story on the podcast before, but yeah. Hey, my name's Greg. I'm a Sagittarius. I like long walks on the beach. Funny story. I don't really like [00:43:00] long, long walks on the beach. Walking sucks, but it's funny. So it's what it's. It is what it is. It is what it is. Alright..

Awesome. We appreciate you joining us. Just a quick recap. We talked about our back to school saga with middle schoolers, high schoolers. My college student somehow hasn't gone back to school yet because the grade schoolers start super early here. I'm sure we'll have tons of drama on her driving in making her sure.

Taser is still charged for going back to school. You need one Urban Campus. We did our shout out to Vince again, congratulations brother. And some fall digital marketing FAQs, mostly me loving up on some LLMs and how you should use them to scale your business

but they continue to be transformative. So yeah, the truth is what it is. And, lastly, Keri hit us with the, what should you be planning on for your business between now and the end of the year. So I appreciate you. We'll see you next time. Until then, keep hustling.

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